Sunday Post

This just in:

A man dressed in black tactical-style gear and armed with an assault rifle opened fire inside a church in a small South Texas community on Sunday, killing 26 people and wounding about 20 others in what the governor called the deadliest mass shooting in the state's history.

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Buried in the Paradise Papers, a massive leak to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which includes the Toronto Star and CBC/Radio-Canada, are more than 5,000 pages of internal records detailing how the Bronfmans and Kolbers invested in Israel through two offshore trust funds in the Cayman Islands.

(Sidebar: these Bronfmans.) 


To wit:

Trudeau owns 7664699 Canada Inc., which he has put in a blind trust during his time as prime minister but which has also been paying him dividends. His brother Alexandre also has a private corporation, 7664737 Canada Inc. The companies are the primary and secondary shareholders in a third private corporation, 176078 Canada Inc., set up in 1995 to hold the assets of their father, former prime minister Pierre Trudeau.

But don't anyone dare hire a relative to work part-time on a farm!




Hey, why not? After all, it's only money:

An Algerian man is set to sue the federal government for the abuses he says he suffered at the hands of American security forces after he left Canada 15 years ago.

I would be fine with this if Morneau and Trudeau paid for it all. It's not like they don't have the cash.


Speaking of Morneau:

Conflict of interest commissioner Mary Dawson says Finance Minister Bill Morneau is the only Liberal cabinet minister who currently holds indirect assets without a blind trust in place.

Also:

The cost of running the Prime Minister's Office has risen to the highest level since 2011.

Justin Trudeau's office cost taxpayers $8.3 million in 2016-17, the latest audited figure available and the first full fiscal year of his prime ministership.

The level is higher than for any year during Stephen Harper's last term of office, 2011-15, a period when the Conservative government was focused on eliminating the federal deficit.

(Merci)




No, Canada cannot absorb masses of people with little proof of identity, no skills with which to better the economy (assuming that there are jobs to give them) and absolutely no desire to be Canadian:

On the heels of the Liberal government's newly-announced strategy to boost immigration levels in the years ahead, Toronto immigration experts are raising questions about whether there is adequate support for the rising tide of economic migrants, family reunifications and refugees, in a city where both stable work and housing can be hard to find.

"The rate of unemployment for racialized immigrant women is very, very high," says Catherine McNeely, the executive director of Newcomer Women's Services, a non-profit settlement organization.

(Sidebar: what does "racialized" actually mean? Are people too afraid to point out race or do people undergo some sort of genetic change upon entry into the country?) 

Also:

When it comes to welcoming newcomers, the Trudeau government has ignored complaints from refugee resettlement agencies about strained resources, while housing asylum seekers in tents, trailers and football stadiums.

Far from focusing on integration, Justin Trudeau changed the law to eliminate the language requirement for newcomers over the age of 54. He also removed warnings against “honour-based” violence from the Citizenship Guide.

Trudeau wants all the benefits of increasing mass immigration – an influx of young workers to offset our aging population – without doing any of the heavy lifting.

This week, the Liberals introduced their 2018 immigration plan, and it’s more of the same.

Plenty of bravado, very little awareness about the public’s growing suspicion and skepticism when it comes to mass migration without a plan for integration.

Yasir Naqvi is a hack:

(Sidebar: this Yasir Naqvi.)

Ontario’s Crown prosecutors will stop trying to keep people in jail while they face charges unless there’s no other choice, their boss Yasir Naqvi said Monday.

Also:

“People here feel they will be blamed as a religion and as a people. Because this guy was a Muslim, Muslims will be blamed anywhere and everywhere.”

Yes, about that:

The Muslim world has tended to treat ISIS as an anomaly, to assert that ISIS is not Islam. This response is intellectually lazy. Muslim-majority countries must confront the underlying problems within aspects of Islamic theology.

ISIS did not usher in a new concept. The concept of an Islamic State is old — centuries old, in fact. ISIS’s goal has been simple: to unite the Muslim world under the black banner of the Khilafah (or Caliphate), and to establish their set of divine laws (Sharia) on Earth. If you are a student of Islamic history, you will recognize myriad examples of ambitious sultans, emirs and warlords — from Timurlane to Aurangzeb — who shared this same desire to establish an Islamic theocracy.

While many Muslim-majority countries do not have a problem with theocratic states, many — including Saudi Arabia, a Sunni Muslim theocracy — have condemned ISIS as a terrorist organization. But these countries have often failed to specifically condemn the ideology that it operates on.

Perhaps Senator Patterson forgets whose hand is up the puppet Trudeau's @$$:

If Canada does not consistently and firmly reassert its ownership claim over the passage, it could eventually become an internationalized strait. As has been the case throughout history, sovereignty often relies on the realpolitik principle of “use or lose it.”

Marc Garneau was ALSO an astronaut but cleared off so that Trudeau could lead the party. How smart could he be?

Our recently minted Governor General, in one of her inaugural appearances, has been very quick off the mark to make her declarative presence known. She gave a talk at a science conference this week, a speech notable for its confident strength of assertion and readiness to pronounce determinatively on matters large and trivial, and which was unfortunately inflected with a tone of condescension that will do little to buttress the appeal of the mainly ceremonial office she now inhabits. ...

Her speech had a scattering, pinball machine trajectory. In the space of a few sentences it went from climate change, to the origin of life, to newspaper horoscopes; from dicta on the “denialism” sometimes confronting the first, to the religious understandings of the second, and the vacuous absurdity of the third. The problem with this neat triad is that, while a tirade against horoscopy might be perfectly agreeable to most everyone (being a machine gun attack on a whole field of straw men  — who reads horoscopes save for feeble amusement?), assertions on life and climate are on another plane entirely.

Her quote: “And we are still debating and still questioning whether life was a divine intervention or whether it was coming out of a natural process let alone, oh my goodness, a random process.” ...

There is more than a taste of Scientism in Ms. Payette’s frequent reference to “learned debate,” an easy phrase but a perplexing concept. How would she characterize debate in the House of Commons, or any of our provincial and municipal assemblies? Probably not up to Royal Society standards, I’d guess. Are we to conflate learned with scientific, for that was plainly her thrust? Should the lesser learned, who somehow get elected, defer to those with B.Sc. degrees? Should we change the franchise? Those with Grade 11 or less, or mere Fine Arts certificates – the “unlearned” or “wrongly learned” – get half a vote?

Naturally, Ms. Payette opined on climate science, and equally naturally placed inquiry and skepticism on what is proclaimed the consensus of that but emergent discipline as denialism – thereby endorsing the ugliest rhetorical term in this entire, explosive issue, which summons the butchery and cruelty of History’s greatest crime as a spurious backdrop to debate on an unresolved public issue. We have a right to expect better from Her Majesty’s representative.

Without people who at least know how to tie their shoes-laces, Trudeau would be hiding in one of his family estates with nothing to do. Surrounding himself with wealthy and (ostensibly) accomplished people, Trudeau cannot help but feel accomplished, too.

Miss Payette's accomplishments have become anemic in the revelation of her keen contempt and arrogance. Science and religion are no more at odds than literary criticism and chemistry are. They are two different disciplines attempting to understand two different things. It is very possible to believe in a greater being and use science as the discipline and tool that it is meant to be. Only a sanctimonious militant atheist with a superiority complex would ever think that belief in deities equals irrationality and stupidity. Do Miss Payette's obnoxious comments cover the "progressive" millennials' embrace of witchcraft?

How about this: the tax-paying masses don't want a governor-general who can't keep her fool mouth shut. They want her to represent the Queen with a sort of decorum that does not include arrogant remarks that put people off.

How about that, Julie?


Also - why people like Payette and Trudeau are stunningly ignorant:

The obfuscation of the teachers’ union publication continued: “Soon, a perceived crisis in Ontario education began to emerge when our students began scoring lower on mathematics standardized tests … First politicians placed the blame for these low test scores on educators.” What an outrageous act of scapegoating that was — what would deteriorating academic performance have to do with the quality and competence of teaching? “Money was poured into boosting the math proficiency of teachers … but the curriculum remained largely unchanged … Scores continued to decline. It looked like it wasn’t the educators after all.” To whom came this apparition that absolved the teachers? The answer, of course, is the teacher’s union: “Now it was the curriculum’s turn to take the blame. Throughout this period of panic over low math scores on standardized tests, some questions have simply not been asked.”

“Could the problem be the standardized testing model? Do these tests provide a fair assessment of true student achievement?” Never mind that the tests had not become more difficult, they must be to blame for deteriorating results. If we just do away with tests, we won’t get depressing results from them and there will be no more of this unjust criticism of teachers, just because their students learn less, other than by immeasurable “problem-solving and discovery methods.”

Climate Barbie doesn't like being called Climate Barbie. It hurts her Climate Barbie feelings. The heat of intense questioning causes her to retreat in her Climate Barbie House:

Environment Minister Catherine McKenna confronted a reporter for The Rebel on Friday, demanding he make a commitment that the far-right website stop calling her “climate Barbie.”

The exchange occurred at a news conference after a meeting of provincial, territorial and federal environment ministers in Vancouver.

Christopher Wilson identified himself as a Rebel reporter and asked McKenna a question about the federal government’s opinion on the role of hydroelectricity as a clean power source.

“So you’re the Rebel Media that happens to call me ‘climate Barbie.’ I certainly hope that you will no longer use that hashtag,” McKenna said.

Wilson replied that he personally has never called her that name.

Climate Barbie comes with  friends, Islamophobia Barbie and the show trial judges:

Jasser told the Canadian MPs, “I am here to tell you that by simply even using that term and referring to it as ‘Islamophobia’ and getting the government into the business of monitoring any form of speech will end up paradoxically heightening societal divisions.

“Trying to suppress what can be painful speech about Islam at society’s fringes will actually paradoxically feed an unintended consequence of fomenting non-Muslim fears of Islam,” he added.

He warned that non-Muslim Canadians and Americans “who cannot have their real fears heard and their speech exercised will be stifled from the public sector and push resentment underground where it will only foment.”

Jasser requested Canadian politicians and opinion leaders “stop engaging [with] Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups in government and media and recognize their misogynist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, and anti-American ideological underpinnings.”

The AIFD chair pressed on Canadian MPs to make sure they understood that the advice they received “from ideological Islamists is compromised by their fealty to [Islamic] clerics, and the tribal construct of Islamic states from Muslim majority nations.” He could have added that leaders of some Islamic sects, who live outside Canada, yet determine what their followers do or say, even in legislatures.

Most presenters at the hearings get a chance to answer questions from MPs on both sides of the house. But as I experienced myself, along with other Muslim opponents of M103, such as columnist Farzana Hassan and activist Raheel Raza, the Liberals and the NDP use this time to attack us or simply refuse to engage with us.

Jasser’s presentation was no exception. Despite taking time out of his schedule and speaking from Phoenix, Arizona, he ended up being scolded and mocked by Liberal MP Arif Virani who used his designated seven minutes berating the American guest and running out the clock, leaving little time for Jasser to respond.

Committee chair Hedy Fry and Liberal MP Arif Virani seem to have a well-coordinated plan on how to humiliate Muslims who do not fit their stereotype of who we are. What happened when I testified was Fry allowed Virani to stage an attack on me right at the end and then when it came time for me to respond, Fry said, “Sorry, time is up.”

Personally, I think a TV show about a scrappy Jack Russell terrier practising law would be more watchable than the other garbage on the box. Also, he should have to raise an impressionable young pup alone:

Did the suspect ask for a lawyer dog? Or did he call a detective “dog,” while seeking a lawyer?

A Louisiana Supreme Court justice appears to side with the canine lawyer interpretation.

Defence lawyers say the confession of Warren Demesme, 24, in a New Orleans rape case should be suppressed because he asked for counsel during an October 2015 interrogation. He told investigators, “Why don’t you just give me a lawyer dog …”

Louisiana’s Supreme Court allowed the confession. The majority issued no written ruling, but in a separate opinion Justice Scott Crichton said Demesme’s “equivocal reference to a ‘lawyer dog”‘ didn’t merit stopping interrogation.

Doesn't anyone speak properly anymore?




How could this go wrong?

Thae Yong-ho, former deputy chief of mission at the North Korean Embassy in London, testified at a U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Wednesday and said Kim Jung Un believes that once North Korea completes its nuclear development, he could negotiate with the United States to reduce South Korea-U.S. joint military drills and ultimately demand U.S. armed forces in South Korea to withdraw. According to the defected former diplomat, North Korea is seeking to follow Vietnam's communization model in the 1970s to achieve a forceful unification taking advantage of economic insecurity once the United States pulls out its armed forces in South Korea.

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North Korea has no interest in having talks on denuclearization with the United States, adding possessing nuclear arms is "irreversible" and "inevitable" to strengthen its "war deterrence," the North's state media said Saturday.

(Merci beaucoup)